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Hong Kong’s Toddler Test

Last month, a couple from mainland China, while visiting the commercial district of Mong Kok, in Hong Kong, allowed their toddler to answer the call of nature in the middle of a busy street. A local who was passing by stopped to capture the urinating child on video. The child’s mother protested and tried to grab the memory card. The father attempted to push onlookers away with a stroller. The altercation grew quickly, drawing a larger crowd, phone cameras, and heated, if mutually incomprehensible, exchange—the locals spoke Cantonese, the couple Mandarin.

Before a week had passed, the uploaded videos were shared more than a million times on social media. In Hong Kong, demonstrators took to the streets and mocked mainlanders by squatting and pretending to defecate on a portrait of Chairman Mao. One wore a pig mask; another dressed as a Red Guard. Mainlanders have rallied to the defense of the couple, swiping at Hong Kong natives for their perceived pettiness and pitiful “colonized mimicry.”

“Would the local man have taken such offense if it was a foreigner toddler that peed?” a post asked indignantly.

Bladdergate has brought the notion of foreignness in Hong Kong into painful focus. A century and a half ago, Great Britain was the foreign power that forcibly wrested the sparsely populated city from the enfeebled Qing government in the aftermath of the First Opium War. On the mainland, the annexation often appears in school lessons as evidence of Western greed and Chinese humiliation. Like the younger child of impoverished parents, Hong Kong had to be sold, it was understood, in order to support the remaining family.

Hong Kong’s adoption into the British Empire appeared, at least for a while, to be mutually advantageous. English investors developed—and reaped economic benefits from—the strategically located port, while Hong Kong flourished into a global metropolis known as the Pearl of the Orient. In the seventies and eighties, when Hong Kong’s music and its movies, with their seductive starlets and intoxicating panoramas of Kowloon Bay, seeped to the mainland, they seemed to define a reversal in fortunes: the bartered-away child had become a star while the homebound siblings languished, still, from scarcity.

This is why 1997, the year in which Hong Kong was handed back to China, meant such different things to Chinese citizens and those of Hong Kong. While then-President Jiang Zemin spoke of the “island’s joyous and long-awaited return to motherland,” many of the islanders themselves, born and bred under British rule, regarded the motherland as unsettlingly foreign.

The subsequent years have not mended Hong Kong’s splintered sense of identity. The Communist government’s perceived encroachment upon the supposed autonomous region, which prizes its laws governing freedom of speech and protest, continues to unnerve locals. The knifing of a prominent newspaper editor known for his liberal views on human rights and corruption this February has only fed those fears.

And then there’s the influx of mainland money and people. Aside from the erosion of political freedom, Hong Kong natives have grown increasingly disgruntled by their forty million annual visitors from across the strait. For the first time in a decade, dissatisfaction with the central government in China has become the majority opinion in the former colony. Among people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine, discontent has swelled to a record eighty-two per cent.

The official Hong Kong response to the case of the urinating child, delivered by a flummoxed secretary of commerce, was to “help educate mainlanders of good manners.” His tone displeased both sides at once, both condoning the offense and condescending to the ostensible offender. A blogger on a public forum hosted by tianya.cn wrote that Chinese tourists should take their children to Hong Kong to pee in more streets. The state-run newspaper People’s Daily compared “the handful of radicals in Hong Kong” to “rampant skinheads and neo-Nazis in Europe.” Xenophobia is the cult of these groups, it opined: “Their opinions have an effect on public opinion, but their actions will usually make trouble for mainstream society.”

But if xenophobia is the problem, who, again, are the strangers? The clash between irritated Hong Kong natives and mainlanders is one of economic and political interests; it rarely finds official expression or redress but flares, every so often, into a cultural flash point, over comically mundane incidents. The rising number of such occurrences, usually involving children—which include, in recent years, a mainland mother feeding her child biscuits on the Hong Kong subway and another permitting her son to pee into a bottle in an upscale restaurant—point to frustrations and exasperations that individual citizens can help go viral online but are at a loss to resolve.

In this sense, grown citizens on both sides of the strait are not so different from their children, whose impulses they cannot curb but whose habits they certainly help form. Unless the governing power lays down more sensible and constructive laws, and abides by them, she’ll be left with a mess on her hands.